Joshua Brown, a 21-year-old who just graduated with a degree in management information systems from CCSU, says he searched unsuccessfully for an internship in his field since early in his sophomore year. During that time, he had to turn down two opportunities specifically because they didn’t pay.
“I didn’t even have an option to say yes to the internship,” Brown said. “I need to pay for things; I just can’t do it. There should be no job or internship where I work where it’s unpaid. It’s just unreasonable in today’s world.”
A measure aimed at expanding support for paid internships in Connecticut is now law, but whether it will go far enough to help students like Brown remains unclear.
The legislation started life as House Bill 5478, proposing a range of business incentives alongside opportunities for students, especially those with financial need. At the end of the legislative session, some of its provisions ended up being folded into the broader workforce bill signed by Governor Ned Lamont on May 11. But it’s what got left out that has advocates and employers concerned.
Known as “Learn and Earn,” the original bill targeted three areas of the internship pipeline: program development assistance, financial support for students and incentives for small businesses and nonprofits.
It required Connecticut’s higher education system to support employers and train them to manage internship programs. The bill also offered stipends for Pell Grant-eligible students to help with additional expenses, such as transportation and work attire. On the employer side, the bill offered tax credits for businesses to help offset the costs of offering paid internships. For nonprofits, which can’t claim corporate tax credits, a separate grant program served the same purpose.
The bill received unanimous support from the Committee on Higher Education and Employment Advancement on March 17 before moving to the Appropriations Committee, where it received a favorable report on April 17. But H.B. 5478 never received a standalone House floor vote before the Connecticut General Assembly adjourned on May 6. Instead, some of its core provisions were passed as part of H. B. 5003, which includes a number of other mandates to support workforce development and labor protections.
Rep. Seth Bronko, the ranking Republican member on the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, supported the original bill because of the provisions for small businesses and LLCs.
“I’m often the one fighting for LLCs because they tend to get overlooked,” Bronko said.
At the time, Bronko cautioned that even though it had full committee support, whether the bill received a vote and passed both chambers would depend on finances.
“Everything up here is a fight for the dollars to fund it,” Bronko said.
He was right. The measure that was finally signed into law retains the tax credits, but it’s missing the specific provisions for Pell Grant support for student interns and a nonprofit grant program to offset the cost of paid internships.
Useful experience
For small businesses, having the desire to offer internships and having the capacity to run them effectively are two different things.
“We want it to be actual useful experience, to make a difference,” Bronko said.
Under the new law, the Board of Regents for Higher Education must develop and offer an online employer training course for creating and managing internship programs through Charter Oak State College by July 1, 2027.
Danielle Cloud, policy director at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said the person typically tasked with managing an internship program at a small business is rarely dedicated to that role alone.
“Creating a quality internship program is hard for them to do sometimes, just because you get into the issues of not having the bandwidth to put a program together,” Cloud said.
That’s what the technical assistance component of the bill is designed to deal with. By connecting small businesses with Connecticut’s higher education system, the bill aims to give employers the tools to build programs that prepare students for the workforce rather than filling gaps in office labor. Bronko said the distinction matters.
“We don’t want interns just being there to run for coffee,” he said.
For small businesses, Cloud said, the challenge isn’t just running a good internship program; it’s being able to pay for one. She explained that 90% of CBIA’s members are businesses with 100 or fewer employees, many of whom operate without the financial flexibility to add intern salaries to their budgets. For those businesses, the tax credit the bill proposed wouldn’t be just an incentive, it might be the difference between offering a paid internship and not offering one at all.
The nonprofit sector faces the same problem. Emmy Franklin, public policy and advocacy associate at the CT Community Nonprofit Alliance, said offering paid internships can be structurally difficult for her organization’s members.
“It’s not that our nonprofits don’t want to pay their interns,” Franklin said. “It’s just that they simply don’t have the flexible revenue.”
Nonprofits operating on fixed government contract rates frequently have no budget line for intern salaries at all, she said. To address this issue, the original bill had a separate grant program for nonprofits, which are unable to claim any of the tax credits offered to for-profit businesses.
Now, without specific language regarding nonprofit grants for paid internships, it is unclear if they will receive the same support.
Financial barriers
For Julian Bond, 21, the barriers go beyond money. As a computer science major at Central Connecticut State University, he struggled for a long time to find any available internship, let alone a paid internship. As a senior this spring, he finally had a personal connection helping him land an internship, one he is still waiting to confirm.
Bond said the process exposed a frustrating paradox: Companies want experience, and internships are supposed to be how students get that experience, but how do they get those internships?
For Bond, getting an internship is also about finding the right career path before it’s too late to change track in school.
“You’ve never actually been in the work environment, so how do you know if it’s something you’re going to love?” Bond said. “By the time you’re a junior, you’re kind of stuck.”
Even if internships are available, there are other financial barriers for students who want those positions. Cloud said the costs that come with starting an internship are easy to overlook from the outside but add up quickly for students operating on tight budgets.
“I remember when I did my first internship,” Cloud said. “I was so broke. I could not afford nice work clothes.”
Franklin also remembers the dilemma of internships in graduate school. She had to leave a full-time job and shift to part-time work to complete an unpaid internship required for her master’s degree in social work, which was financially challenging.
“Paid internships are really the only option for students who can’t afford to work for free,” Franklin said.
Colby Brennan is a journalism student at Central Connecticut State University. This story is republished via CT Community News, a service of the Connecticut Student Journalism Collaborative, an organization sponsored by journalism departments at college and university campuses across the state.
